The complex beauty of Formula 1

To enter the Renault team's box in the Montmelò - the Formula 1 circuit of Catalunya - you must cross a narrow corridor, with about fifty professional headphones on the wall. From the first steps, you start to smell the perfume of the paddock: a mix of rubber and oil that pervades the nostrils. In the beginning, it is not pleasant but it takes only five minutes to get used to it. A Formula 1 team's garage is much smaller than it is reasonable to imagine: there is only room for two cars, a cluster of monitors in the middle, columns of tires stacked in an orderly manner and a fortnight between mechanics and staff that hovers in a frenetic but orderly in the box. Incomprehensible graphs populate the monitors' screens with triangular shapes similar to those of stock market shares.

These are the pre-season days of the test of the 2018 Formula 1, which start off next weekend in Australia. The tests are one of the most important moments of the season because the teams try to collect and analyze the greatest amount of data: it is a very complicated process, involving highly qualified people and cutting-edge technology and many attributes to this detachment with the reality the loss of popularity of Formula 1 in recent years. nss sports was invited by Le Coq Sportif inside the box of the Renault team to let us explain how a Formula 1 is created and what is the work of a team in 2018: instead of being scared by the technological complexity, we left fascinated.

From the bottom of the box, I try to scan the zigzag lines on the three screens in the middle of the garage, two mechanics are arguing pointing to a peak in the data. My attention is immediately disturbed by the strong metal roar of the new RS18 driven by Carlos Sainz Jr who returns to the garage. The time to take the car into the garage and close the view with prying eyes from prying eyes and the mechanics are produced in a ballet of precise and delicate movements that in less than five minutes dismantles the machine and connects it to a sort of umbilical cord of black cables.

The RS18 remains there, in its sinuously aerodynamic forms and in its complex technological beauty, while through the cord the data that the machine has collected in the lap just concluded is exported, operating as an external memory. Those same data will be analyzed by an engineer in who knows which part of the world through a complex software program designed in another continent. In those numbers and in those lines there is 2018 Formula 1, the sport that is most shaped by technology in our time.

Tech, humans and Formula 1's storytelling

As human beings, we are frightened by what we do not know and we can not understand. The recent decline in popularity in the last years of Formula 1 has a lot to do with the complex relationship we have with technology. In Formula One of the Schumacher era and the previous one, the perception that the public had of the two main components of the sport - the car and the pilot - was biased towards the rider's skill. The technology was not yet developed and the media narrative focused exclusively on the human side of the sport.

It was the patinated era of the great drivers - from Senna, Prost, Mansell, Lauda up to Michael Schumacher - where the public was passionate about personal stories, rivalries and the excitement of the track. Little space was devoted to the technological narration because they were actually less decisive than they are now.

Things have changed in the last decade due to the dizzying technological progress that has affected Formula 1, obscuring the narration dedicated to pilots and the "human" side. This combined - with a bad management of the regulation has to alienate the public from the circuits and the sport. A significant part of the blame is rightly attributed to Bernie Ecclestone - sultan of the Circus for almost 40 years - whose target audience consisted of "those with the Rolex, not the millennials".

The season that is about to begin should represent the year zero of the new Formula 1 after the purchase by Liberty Media. Management is already renewing the stale image of the sport through a rebrand of the Formula 1 world - a new logo has been presented, streaming services and presence on social networks - and an update of the regulations to promote competitiveness among the teams. However, selling a sport like the contemporary Formula 1 still as a race between drivers before between cars is reductive and in my opinion wrong. Formula 1 is not just an entertainment show: it is the most innovative and developed outpost of a stratospheric industry like the automotive and engineering.

"It's more like a combat aircraft rather than a regular car"

This was the phrase with which the press office of Renault introduced us to the technical description of the RS18, the car of the new season on which they will ride Niko Hulkenberg and Carlos Sainz Jr. The materials, the design and the aerodynamics are the same ones that come used for combat aircraft, not the one used for building your car to go to work. In truth, just the resemblance to the machines of ordinary mortals we make Formula 1 the recurring nightmare of every aerospace engineer: "imagine having to calculate the lift and loads of an airplane with four annoying pieces of rubber at the ends that constantly touch the ground, uncomfortable eh? "

Today a Formula 1 weighs by regulation 734 kg and is composed of approximately 50.0000 components, each one - even the most miserable collector - is designed and built individually. The sinuous and tapered shapes of the body are the result of the 2.5 petabytes of data collected in the wind tunnel and the 95 million virtual simulations of the race conducted each year, thanks to the partnership between Renault and Microsoft. The engines - or better the power units - of the Formula 1 2018 are the most advanced for thermal efficiency close to 50%, while previously the F1 engines reach a maximum of 30%. Then there are the tires: supplied by Pirelli, they are the most precious source of data available to the teams. 

Striking these impressive statistics, it is legitimate to ask how much the difference of three-tenths of a second between two cars depends on the car or the talent of a driver. "Being honest, the car matters a lot more, and it's normal that this is so", the Renault manager replies us.
However, consider for a second the object that best sums up the sporting complexity of Formula 1 both from a human and technological point of view: the steering wheel of the single-seater. Compared to the black circle you're used to, the steering wheel of an F1 single-seater is a carbon rectangle with:

- 8 levers on the back
- 12 buttons
- 1 screen
- 5 central knobs, the main one with over 14 functions
- 4 scroll-wheels in the corners

The pilot uses all the functions on the steering wheel, none is superfluous since it is forbidden to make any electronic modification by remote. He presses all the buttons speeding uè to 300 km/h, surpassing other cars, in a race that can make him lose more than 3 kg of weight while the box speaks to him in the helmet. Now when you will argue in the next conversation about the importance of technology in Formula 1, think about how many human beings would be able to drive it. Few, according to my calculations.

The circus: the visible and invisible one

A Formula 1 race concentrates a world made by thousands of people in one hour and a half. The cliché with the top of the iceberg and the comparison with the Circensian life work, but we have to define precisely the dimension of that circus behind the hour and a half that we spent on the sofa. The internal paddock of Montmelò is made by some sort of boulevard made by the motorhomes and the truck brought by every team. The bigger stables bring actual palaces to the circuit: they are combinable buildings with multiple floors that hosts the offices, the hospitality area and the storage for every team. They look like some space containers, that don’t lack taste and architectonic variations: like the more classic rounded shapes, to the black corners of the Mercedes motorhome and the terraces of the Red Bull one.

Every stable brings approximately a hundred people to the circuit (60 technicians, 40 staff), with the Pirelli technicians, the FIA staff, and every circuit’s staff to be count on. A small town made by almost 2000 people that colonize the circuit for a week, every year. This small community is made by different people that shares what in most cases is pure passion and a unique lifestyle: those who follow the team in every race stay away from home at least 300 days every year, questioning the very definition of home.

And even if the hard contest reaches the industrial espionage (every team has a photographer that has to sneak into other teams’ boxes) there a strong solidarity and union among the inhabitants of the paddock: many of them eat at the rival cafeterias and they have a coffee together. The concept is explained when the city has to move from a circuit to another: every stable count at least twenty trucks for the European travels, while for the intercontinental ones some jumbo jets and ships are loaded with special containers.

This is the hidden circus, but there’s also an invisible one: factories. If you consider that about 1000 people are involved in the work on the framework and the engine of a single-seater (not counting the external companies), it seems wrong not to involve them in the Formula 1 family. From the cad designers to the workers on the work-lines, everyone deserves his own acknowledgment for a show that is made by an half-afternoon-long race. Formula 1 is a very complicated universe, that goes from the engineering vanguard to the most unthinkable logistic, we must not be scared but enjoy its charm.